The corona vaccines protect well against death from COVID-19, without increasing the risk of death from other causes. The RIVM and Statistics Netherlands report this on Thursday research commissioned by the House of Representatives into the causes of four periods of excess mortality during the corona pandemic.
According to the RIVM, results show that there is a reduced risk of death in the eight weeks after vaccination, compared to the risk without this vaccine dose. But the institute also guards against conclusions that are too firm. It could also be that people who were vaccinated were on average slightly healthier than people who were not vaccinated.
During the third excess mortality period, which began around the end of the summer of 2021, some 11,000 more people than usual died during that period. More than three thousand of them died of a cause other than corona-related complaints.
It is unclear what caused her to die. RIVM and CBS have no explanation for this. According to Statistics Netherlands, further research is needed for this.
The two bodies conducted the research on behalf of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS). This was commissioned after the House of Representatives had adopted a motion by MP Pieter Omtzigt in December.
External experts criticize the numbers
The numbers are also criticized. An independent expert group of, among others, professors, which was put together at the request of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, says that there is “a lack of access to (medical) data”. The estimates by Statistics Netherlands are therefore insufficiently substantiated, according to the experts.
For example, according to Ronald Meester, professor of Probability Theory at the VU, CBS is “much too firm” about the number of corona-related deaths. “The poor registration, often based on no more than suspicions and symptoms, does not allow such a conclusion at all. In addition, not only primary causes of death, but also secondary and tertiary causes of death should be considered.”
Four periods of excess mortality in 2020 and 2021
Statistics Netherlands has looked at excess mortality in recent years. If this is the case, more people will die than could have been expected. This happened four times in 2020 and 2021: in March and April 2020, in August 2020, between September 2020 and January 2021 and between August and December 2021.
The second death wave was caused by a heat wave. In the first period, “the excess mortality was as great as the number of people registered by Statistics Netherlands with COVID-19 as the cause of death” and in the third wave, more people died from corona than there was excess mortality. In those two periods, a relatively large number of people died from a corona infection.
In 2020 and 2021, a total of approximately 340,000 people died in the Netherlands. This is about 30,000 more people “than expected if there had been no COVID-19 epidemic”.